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ZEISS DTI thermal imaging cameras. For more discoveries at night, and during the day.

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  1. T

    What is a species?

    If one's interested in the molecular clock (2% per million years) I'd urge you to read the nature review I linked. Afaik, this rough figure---which will obviously vary somewhat depending on circumstances---is still generally used as a yardstick
  2. T

    What is a species?

    Of course it's rarely apparent or easy to determine whether a difference is "key" or not. So usually people default to whatever genetic or character distance information is at hand: "We don't [really] know how relevant it is but of the (few usually) genes we've looked at there's a sequence...
  3. T

    What is a species?

    Different genes (and parts of genes) evolve at different rates. For example, those bits which are responsible for a function tend to be more conserved than the bits in between which produce no functional result (introns). Those may evolve more or less at random. An individual is a bundle of...
  4. T

    What is a species?

    I don't recognise some of your numbers. In general, I think people tend to assume divergence of about 2% per 1 million years: https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/the-molecular-clock-and-estimating-species-divergence-41971/ Southern Alps uplift started 15M years ago...
  5. T

    What is a species?

    I think the southern Alps are around 15 million years old. NZ was once much larger and in the far past, part of Gondwana. The recent distributions we see are relicts---it's extremely unlikely that something as ancient and distinct as the Stephens Island wren actually arose and was always only...
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